The spiderweb is an everyday architecture — non-monumental and easily overlooked. Yet artists and scientists are working to unlock the secret of its complex geometry, a mystery that could inspire everything from resilient new building materials to deeper understandings of the structure of the universe. When artist Tomàs Saraceno first came to MIT in 2012, as the inaugural Center for Art, Science, & Technology (CAST) visiting artist, he had recently pioneered a new method of scanning 3D webs with researchers at TU Darmstadt in Germany using sheet lasers. Inspired by…
